Why Is the Museum of Modern Art Dead Set on Perpetrating a Hideous Act of Architecture-cide?

The most astonishing thing about the Museum of Modern Art’s announcement last week that it intends to tear down the former American Folk Art Museum on West 53rd Street was the rationale MoMA offered for this appalling decision. According to a report in the Times,because the folk-art museum’s powerful sculptural bronze façade was “opaque,” it was “not in keeping with the glass aesthetic of the rest of the museum.” The small, widely admired building, by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, is only 12 years old. It also happens to be in the way of the Modern’s relentless westward expansion, but let’s put that point aside for a moment, since real-estate hegemony is nothing new in New York, and the sorry sight of cultural institutions acting like real-estate developers is all too familiar.

But when MoMA—the first museum in the United States to have an architecture-and-design department, and the institution that has probably done more than any other to teach the public to appreciate architecture—tries to justify demolishing one of New York’s finest recent buildings on the grounds that it doesn’t go with the rest of MoMA. . . Well, that reminds me of nothing so much as the story I once heard of a woman in Dallas who told her art dealer that she was sorry, but she couldn’t keep that Matisse after all because her decorator had decided it was the wrong blue.

We look to MoMA for judgment and taste-making, not for rank indifference to aesthetic matters. Of course the folk-art museum looks different from the Museum of Modern Art. It was supposed to. The American Folk Art Museum has never been anything but a small institution, and part of the architectural challenge Williams and Tsien faced was to give it a strong, independent identity so that it would not disappear entirely beside its enormous neighbor. The façade of folded planes of hammered bronze that they produced combines the monumental dignity of a good civic building with the intimate texture of a handcrafted work—no small accomplishment.

By now everyone knows that the folk-art museum ran into financial difficulties, retreated in 2011 to what had been its satellite facility near Lincoln Center, and put the Williams-Tsien building up for sale. Naturally MoMA bought it. The Modern was already gearing up to expand yet again (it had opened its last expansion, designed by Yoshio Taniguchi, in 2004), in the form of several floors of new exhibit space at the bottom of an 82-story condominium tower by the architect Jean Nouvel that the Houston-based developer Hines was planning to construct at 53 West 53rd Street, just down the block from MoMA. The museum was deeply involved in that project from the start—it had sold the land to Hines in 2007—and Nouvel’s plans called for working his tower around the folk-art museum. Back then, no one expected the little museum would go belly up.

That’s a key point. It’s obviously not necessary that the folk-art museum be torn down so that the new tower—which is one of the more promising skyscrapers to be proposed for New York in years, although that is quite beside the point—can be built. The original design called for the tower to have gone around the folk-art museum, and if the crash of 2008 hadn’t caused the tower project to be postponed, that’s what would have happened. It was presumed that the folk-art museum and MoMA would retain their minnow-to-whale relationship forever.

But what a difference a recession makes. Down went the stock market, onto the shelf went the plans for Nouvel’s building, and then down went the folk-art museum. And now, as the project comes back to life, MoMA announces that the folk-art museum has to go. It doesn’t fit; its galleries are too small to be used effectively for the Modern’s collections; the little building’s floors do not line up with MoMA’s.

All true, but so what? Yes, a 40-foot-wide plot is not the ideal size for a museum. Williams and Tsien struggled heroically to make the interior space workable, but it was never ideal. MoMA, though, is a vast institution that seems to devour every kind of space; it could surely find a use for this if it wanted to. Perhaps it could be a separate set of galleries for one particular department, or that any curatorial department could use to display smaller works. The writer Deborah Solomon has suggested that the building could be a good home for the library of the Modern, much of which has been in storage in Queens, and there are probably other viable non-gallery uses.

The American Folk Art Museum is one of the significant buildings constructed in New York so far in the 21st century and one of the few works in their home city by a pair of architects who are among the most respected in the world. In Philadelphia, Williams and Tsien’s new building for the Barnes Foundation has quickly become a landmark among contemporary American museums.

When MoMA bought the folk-art building two years ago, I remember thinking that getting rid of it was a possibility, but I doubted that the Museum of Modern Art would dare do such a thing. It seemed cynical for this museum of all institutions to tear down a building of such distinction, and make 53rd Street, which has already lost much of the diversity of scale and use it once had, more uniform still. But that view clearly was naïve.

The saddest part of this entire episode is what is says about the Modern, once a small museum itself, whose early identity was marked in the way in which its original building broke through the line of brownstones on West 53rd Street—a perfect symbol of a young institution that took pride in its fresh, creative thinking. That was quite literally a lifetime ago; we haven’t seen that MoMA in six decades.

MoMA’s expansions have brought many good things, to be sure, and I’m the last person to argue that cultural institutions can, or should, remain static. Come to think of it, however, here’s another idea for the folk-art-museum building: maybe it should be used to display a small selection of MoMA’s extraordinary collection, so that people can experience some of its great works in a small-scaled space and have a tiny hint of the intimate, enticing museum that MoMA once was.